Uneven Ground by Ronald D. Eller

Author:Ronald D. Eller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2008-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

The fight for a national abolition bill dramatized the gap between middle-class conservationists who saw surface mining essentially as an aesthetic and moral assault against the environment and Appalachian activists who perceived the practice as part of a larger system of regional exploitation. Conservationists were more willing to compromise in favor of government regulation, but the former poverty warriors and poor people who led the mountain resistance organizations distrusted the ability of institutions to protect their lives and homesteads. At a people’s hearing on strip mining held in Wise, Virginia, on December 4, 1971, more than two hundred activists gathered to hear mountain residents deplore the courts, legislatures, and other “institutionalized channels” that refused to respond to the plight of local people. Joe Begley from Letcher County, Kentucky; Rufus Brooks from Logan County, West Virginia; John Tiller from Brammel, Virginia; Bessie Smith from Knott County, Kentucky; and dozens of other speakers echoed the words of the Reverend Warren Wright, a Letcher County, Kentucky, farmer and anti–strip mining activist, who urged the crowd to rise up in democratic protest against the “industrial and political conspiracy” that was ruining the mountains and mountain life. The “question of strip mining,” chided Begley, was “more than a question of beauty and trees.” It was also a matter of “the destruction of farms and homes.”59

Regional activists used the struggle against strip mining to expand their networks, to organize new citizen-based organizations, and to foster what they believed was a “regional democratic movement.”60 Regional strategy meetings like those held in Middlesboro, Huntington, and Wise brought together local opponents of surface mining, but they also provided venues for sharing information and ideas on a variety of other issues. New organizations such as Save Our Cumberland Mountains in east Tennessee sprang up to oppose strip mining and to work for landowner rights in their areas. Led by young radicals like Michael Clark of the Church of the Brethren Appalachian Caucus and the Reverend B. Lloyd of the Anglican Appalachian People’s Service Organization, a number of religious organizations, including the Knoxville-based Commission on Religion in Appalachia, joined the crusade. Leaders of SOK, especially its director, James Branscome, and writers Harry Caudill and Jack Weller, spoke widely at college and university rallies throughout the mountains, spreading the idea that Appalachia was an exploited colony within modern America and that surface mining was only one manifestation of a corrupt political and economic system.

Many of the new organizations published newsletters that reached thousands of readers inside and outside Appalachia, but no organization played a larger role in providing a network for regional activism than the CSM. Traditionally a rather moderate voice for reform, the council was taken over in 1969 by young activists who redirected the old organization’s mission toward more radical causes and restructured its many commissions to reflect the interests of youth, community organizers, and the poor. The council no longer represented “professional persons, settlement school, religious, health, and education workers, and businessmen and philanthropists” interested in Appalachia but instead

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